The Dord of Darien

Musings from the Mayor of the Internet

Wild adventure builds character

Hey, Majesty 2 is coming out in two weeks? Didn’t that get cancelled like seven years ago?

Well, hey, I was a big fan of the original Majesty, so I can’t complain. Majesty, for those who never played it, was an RTS very much in the old Warcraft vein, but without the picky micromanagement — you can’t control the units directly, so clearly you never have to manage a hundred of them at the same time. Instead, you provide economic incentives for them, and they do their own thing on their own. It was kind of a new idea, and it was refreshing and fun. The art and music were bright and cheery, too; nice to play a fantasy game that wasn’t entirely based on book five of Lord of the Rings. So I liked it; it was easy to play (though not necessarily easy to win), it was cheerful, it was fun, and an acquaintance of mine was in the voice cast, which makes me laugh every time I hear the rangers speak.


September 5th, 2009 Posted by | Games | no comments

Free agent classification

Jeff Passan has a column up about the bizarre and eldritch way free agents are classified in baseball. Normally I like Jeff Passan, and he’s fine here too — he’s pretty much on the money with most of what he says. Really, I just wanted to post this so I could poke fun at his very first sentence, where he complains that the free agent rankings say Josh Willingham is better than Ryan Howard. I get what you’re saying, Jeff, and you’re pretty much right; I just think it’s funny that, going by the numbers, this year’s Josh Willingham model is in fact better than this year’s Ryan Howard. Not by a lot — 146 to 134 OPS+, to use one easy stat — but better is better. And Willingham is a corner outfielder, where his defense is slightly more valuable than Howard’s 1B.


September 5th, 2009 Posted by | Baseball | no comments